Apple maintains slight marketshare lead in US, but Samsung is catching up

Kantar WorldPanel has released figures for the three months running up to April 2014, which show an increase in the number of manufactures competing for the top spots in the European smartphone market. The report also shows Android remaining in the lead when it comes to overall shares of the smartphone market. Google has 70 percent in the five big European markets and 51 percent in the US. While iOS retains a comfortable second place across the board, Windows Phone still climbs steadily as the underdog.

One of the larger beneficiaries of this latest report regarding manufacturers is Huawei, which experienced a steep hike of 123 percent in the big five European markets over the past year. Over in China, local vendor Xiaomi outsold Samsung for the second time in April, with its RedMi device proving to be the popular choice among local consumers in that region.

Samsung has almost caught up with Apple in the USA, with market shares of 34.1 percent and 34.6 percent respectively. The growth of Android also brings fragmentation with multiple manufacturers attempting to compete for the top spot in Europe, the US and Asia. The platform war itself is starting to heat up with Microsoft closing the gap on Apple's iOS with hopes that Windows Phone 8.1 will solve the majority of its flaws.

There aren't any drastic changes through the last three months, but do check out the full report over on Kantar for more details.

not totally a surprise. I know people that had an iphone for the ios 6 look and unknowingly updated to changed ios 7 & hate the ios 7 look. I know many feel that iphones are not leaps and bounds ahead of the competition anymore. That it's a wash. That android phones do pretty much the same thing, email, twitter, Instagam, Facebook, text. That the last several product launches show there isn't much separating different phones for the nonpartisan non-phone enthusiast.

Personally, i think cell phones have plateaued for now and become pretty much like tvs where there isn't one must have tv brand; most tvs do about the same thing whether it's a Vizio at Costco or the Samsung that's $300 more.

The iPhone 5s is months old and the Galaxy S5 is new. Everybody who wanted to buy a new iPhone would have done so already. Everybody else is waiting for the new one. Once the iPhone 6 is released, Apple's market share will go back up. It happens literally every year.

Or maybe people are finally realizing that bigger screens and software customizations are much better than iOS and the iPhone's tiny screen. Glad this is happening, now lets hope Apple adds more customization to iOS so iOS can be great once again.

Umm customizing isn't necessarily rooting, it means software features that allow you to personalize your phone without having to root it. Kinda like how you have to jailbreak your iPhone in order to customize it except on Android it comes with the stock software. Never rooted any of my Android phones and can do a lot more than just move around the icons and change the background wallpaper.

I think it's more about Samsung introducing a custom size screen for every occasion. They have every screen size available to customers so they sell a few million more here and a few million more there. The problem is that there is nothing proprietary about a screen size so there is no customer loyalty or stickiness. These extra users that Samsung has been slowly gaining will jump ship when he next thing comes along. That might be a bigger iPhone but it might not be. The point is that it takes more than a small screen for iPhone users to leave iOS in droves. Apple will maintain or slightly grow their iPhone user base over the next few years and yet they don't even need to.